Southwest watch. Development.

New Lenox Mayor Happy With North-south Extension-up To A Point

As mayor of New Lenox, John Nowakowski is delighted with the prospect of extending the North-South Tollway to Interstate Highway 80 at New Lenox.

But he's not quite as thrilled with the prospect of lengthening the tollway from there to I-57 near Peotone.

The reason is that Nowakowski doesn't want the tollway to split his village in two. And there's a good likelihood that could happen if the toll road were to extend farther south.

"It would be a tremendous hardship for us," Nowakowski said. Not only would police, firefighters and schoolchildren have difficulty traversing the community, he said, but it would also interfere with Park District plans to build a golf course.

One solution would be to build extra police and fire stations and schools on the "wrong" side of the road, but the Will County cap on property-tax increases might make that difficult.

Another possibility would be to route the southern leg of the tollway extension east a ways, clearing New Lenox, before it heads south. That's the approach Nowakowski favors.

He says he had sent a letter to the Illinois Department of Transportation asking for a meeting to discuss the problem. Now, he'll have to send one to the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority in the wake of last week's vote by the General Assembly that transferred responsibility for the highway from IDOT to the authority.

But chances are Nowakowski and the rest of New Lenox won't have to worry about the Peotone extension for some time. Building the road depends on a decision to build a third regional airport near Peotone.

The federal government won't make that decision for at least two years, until a master plan for the site is completed.

But even sooner, the U.S. Department of Transportation is due in the near future to decide if it is willing to put up the initial $2 million needed to pay for the first part of that study.

And how will the tollway extension that will be built, the part between Bolingbrook and New Lenox, affect New Lenox?

Conventional wisdom says New Lenox (population 9,627) will grow even faster. But Nowakowski isn't so sure.

"We're in a growth belt right now," he said. "I don't see that changing. I don't know if this (the toll road) will spur us that much."

According to projections of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, New Lenox's population will hit 13,636 by 2010. The estimate, made more than two years ago, assumed that I-355 would be extended to New Lenox, according to John Paige, the council's director of planning services.

Growth yardstick

To get an idea of how fast your community is growing, you can take a census.

Or you can count the number of people waiting in voting lines.

By that last measure, it's easy to tell what the fastest-growing part of Will County is-Frankfort and Mokena.

Last week, the Executive Committee of the Will County Board approved a proposal to add two new precincts in Frankfort Township, raising the number there to 20, and one each in five other townships.

"A good-size precinct is 500 to 600 voters," said County Clerk Jan Gould. "The one in Frankfort Township had 1,800. . . . We had complaints in November of people having to wait in line 1 1/2 hours to vote."

Gould estimated it will cost the county an extra $2,000 to set up each precinct. The County Board is expected to pass the proposal this month.

Road to compromise?

The deal is on the table. The question is whether the majority of Crete trustees will accept it.

Crete badly wants a $2 million federal grant to repair Richton Road. To do that, it must come up with $400,000.

Trustees originally planned to sell off part of the Reed Ekal property, a large wooded area east of the village that came into village and Park District hands for non-payment of real estate taxes. Twenty-six lots were sold earlier.

Two trustees, however, want to keep the property unspoiled-or as unspoiled as possible. And under state law, it takes a three-quarters vote of the Village Board to sell village land, giving trustees Tom Knuth and Shirley Dunbar effective veto power on the six-member board.

Knuth says he and Dunbar are willing to vote to guarantee the village's portion of the Richton Road project by selling off some of the property. But in return, they say, the rest of the board has to agree not to sell any more Reed Ekal land.

"We'd love a compromise," he said. "I think it would meet their goals and ours."